Keeping the Voyagers alive has become an extraordinary act of engineering care. Their power comes from the heat of decaying plutonium, and each spacecraft loses about four watts every year. Four watts is almost nothing here on Earth. Out there, it can mean choosing between a science instrument, a heater, or the system that keeps an antenna pointed toward home.
Suzanne Dodd and Kareem Badaruddin are helping make those choices.
Suzanne first joined Voyager in 1984, fresh from college, writing sequences of science and engineering commands for the encounters with Uranus and Neptune. She returned as project manager in 2010. She also directs JPL’s Interplanetary Network, which includes the Deep Space Network used to communicate with spacecraft across the solar system.
Voyager has followed Suzanne through nearly the whole arc of her career. She began as a young engineer helping prepare for encounters with worlds no spacecraft had seen. Today, she is responsible for guiding the mission through its final years.
Kareem is Voyager’s mission manager. He works close to the machinery of survival, where every command must account for power, temperature, aging hardware, old software, and the immense delay between action and answer. A message to Voyager 1 now takes about 23 hours to arrive. The response requires another 23 hours to reach Earth.
When Voyager 1 stopped returning usable science and engineering data in November 2023, the team traced the problem to damaged computer memory. They divided and moved pieces of software code into other locations inside a computer built in the 1970s. In April 2024, intelligible engineering data returned. Science data followed.
The immediate struggle is power. In April 2026, the team shut down another instrument on Voyager 1 after its electrical margin became dangerously thin. Two science instruments remain active, one listening to plasma waves and the other measuring magnetic fields in a region no other operating spacecraft has reached.
Voyager 2 currently has three science instruments operating. During the summer of 2026, the team carried out an operation they called the Big Bang. They switched off several powered devices at once and replaced their functions with alternatives that consume less energy, while keeping the spacecraft warm enough to survive. The power they saved should allow Voyager 2 to continue gathering science for at least another year. The team hopes to attempt a similar operation on Voyager 1.
The Voyagers are not being preserved simply because they are old or beloved. They continue to measure the space between stars, returning observations from places we cannot study in any other way. Still, affection is plainly present. These machines have outlived many of the people who created them. Their care has passed between generations.
Suzanne and Kareem are helping hold that thin radio connection open. Two spacecraft move farther into the dark each second. Here on Earth, a small group of people keeps listening for their voices.
